RE: Shipping Costs -- While it is true that shipping internationally is more expensive than domestic shipping, ultimately a seller's profit margin depends on his or her's sourcing ability and cost. If a product is readily available and inexpensive to source in one's home market compared to foreign markets, then it makes sense to list on foreign sites. For example, I've sold several Tumi briefcases on European eBay sites even though the shipping cost is often $75 or more. Even with very high shipping I can compete with European sellers because my sourcing cost is much lower. Alternatively, I can raise the price on eBay and absorb some of the additional shipping costs into the listing price. You are correct, however, that it doesn't make sense to compete with domestic sellers if the product you are selling is readily available in the target market.

Yes, it is advisable to use the eBay site's native language in your item description. However, there are several English eBay sites including US, UK, Canada, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines. For some large sellers, it may be worthwhile to pay for a one-time item description translation (i.e., for eBay Germany). Customer support inquiries generally do not require the same level of language precision as the item description itself. In this case, the seller can use automatic translation tools to view and respond to non-English customer inquiries.

Thanks for your reply.For the last year I have been working on a solution that enables the embedding of human-translated, multilingual content into 3rd party sites. I was not sure that there would be a benefit for this on eBay.

Good question -- a lot of sellers are confused by this and assume that they need separate eBay seller IDs for each site. In fact you can use your existing eBay account for selling on ALL eBay sites. eBay doesn't really advertise this fact and all eBay sites are localized for their respective markets. For example, the eBay Germany interface is entirely in German. This is why GlobalLink is beneficial for international sellers -- you can use your exisiting eBay seller ID and GlobalLink does all of the currency, language and timezone conversions for you.